9 comments:

Ed!I wonder how it`s been with dog attacks so far. You did write a line or two in French about problems,but it could be interesting for people who thinks all dogs are nice to reade about slightly different dogs. How one giant dog will bite into your panniers to stop you,and then a slightly bigger dog moves in for a bite...

I don`t think you quite have come to the areas with grassland yet. This time of year not a single green grass-straw in sight. All the dogs are more or less unemployed and bored and you passing on the road/track will be the most exiting thing they have seen all year.

I remember spring of 98 up in the mountains way east of you. One giant dog came after me. It looked mad and rabied and dragged a 20-30 kilos chain after it. I felt panic cycling as fast as I could on the stony track. Waving one plastic pipe behind me to prevent it from biting into my panniers and stop me. In the end the chain became to heavy to drag and it stopped. After that I would normally stop and defend myself if I could not escape.

If you felt "Alex" story about the two 1.2 m. pipes was missing something then you are right. Back in the mountains in 02 I spiked my new 20 mm pipes. I did so by splitting one end of the pipes. Putting in a long screw with 3-4 nuts then a wide washer and one more nut. I locked the screw with a hose-clamp. It is pronounced something like: "tja`zer" in Chinese. On the screw I could quickly put on darts and I would be ready for a fight. Just waving them in front of me covering 180 degrees. Keeping my back facing something safe like a cliff or a fence.

Sometimes I would stop for several minutes to watch distant dogs move away from the road and over a hill. I would also have a large knife for close battles.

OK for all of you this sounds like madness,but then you never had a pack of dogs after you. The dogs so big and hungry looking you no longer fear for rabies but you fear being eaten alive. When being attacked I guess I would like to kill them all,but I don`t even try to harm them. I just want to scare them away. The spikes,knife and throwing of stones gives me the confidence to defend my ground until they give up or me or them are being rescued by the owner or locals. Some of the dogs find me scary,they just stand there shaking with their legs wide apart unable to move. I can`t harm any of the attacking dogs. They all play an important role as workmates to the shepherds. The children in the family treats them as pets. So if I had harmed a dog in any way I would have to pay up for a new dog while the crying children probably would bombard me with stones.

So Ed you need to be able to defend yourself and scare off attacking dogs. But do it in a peaceful way so you don`t make them more aggressive. And no need to harm them. Don`t show the darts to a dog owner. I guess you are so peaceful and harmeless you lack the ability to harm anyone or anything anyway. But you can allways pretend if nessecary. The best is to shout for help to the nearest yurt and hopefully someone will walk you past the dogs. Shout in English so they know you are a foreigner. You mentioned a hostile village. I never had a problem further east but west of you in Tibet itself I have heard it can be a problem. In the east if I asked for help and there were people near by they would normally come and help me. You may be met by a shrug an "help yourself". If you meet really,really hostile people they might tell the dogs to attack you and then you have to be able to defend yourself. The chanse of that happening is very remote,but just keep it in the back of your mind so you know what is happening if it should happen. Even big dogs will find the sharp noice from the Dazer painful,but if they are deaf or moving in at 30 km/h it will have no affect. You need something more. Once I carried firecrackers with me. I never used them. At first they probably would scare the dogs away,but they may come back fiercer than before once the noice has ended.

Maybe you can tie a number of small rags to your panniers so they will rip them off instead of biting into your bags. Someone said the liquid bleach would scare dogs away. Bleach kind of scares me away too,so I have never tried it.

Remember giant marmots,foxes,wolves and whatever will lose their natural shyness if they have rabies at a sertain stage. So what may look like the perfect photo-opportunity might end up like your worst nightmare.

Do you sometimes cycle in the mountains with your legs unprotected? Wear at least long pants,Kevlar pants would be the best but I guess that doesn`t exist.

If you are bitten,scratched or licked by an animal that might have rabies,get to the nearest town asap and start a program of 5(?)vaccinations. The closer to your head the less time you have. Why don`t you go to a doctor now in Dege and ask him/her about the situation? Be careful Ed! Next to Ebola Rabies is the ugliest way to go(my oppinion).And Ebola you can`t get in Asia.

Oh no! Does todays comment make me come across as "barking mad"?

Tonight I gonne watch "Smith&Jones" on telly. They used to be funny years ago,maybe they still are?

Brilliant! first back with freeze, death, kill, death now moving in for the double wammy tag team monster dogs from hell. Plus "Ebola rabies" the new threat from the east forget bird flu it's chicken feed in comparison.

Also miles and miles of reading with a quick mention of Ebola near the end.

Brilliant just perfect.

I'm glad Asmund your back I was thinking of joining the fray and slagging the yanks and frogs off for a while. It seems such sport at present, now I can rest in peace and enjoy the Blog as there's nothing on telly at the moment anyway.

A+ top of the class

Smith "ere jones! do you think that Asmund is some sort a nutter?"Jones "ere well he's a foreign, foreign eh sort of bloke is'nt he?"Smith "Yeah!"Jones "well he barking of course they all are! Them foreigners"Smith "of course i forgot they all are nutters them foreigners!"Jones "nutters yeah!"Smith "yeah nutters!"

and so on for about 20 mintues can't wait till you get "little britain" in Sweden or whatever dark place you live in. Tell me does it only get light for very brief moment at this time of year?

Just before I google that, I thought I'd show you this, which was an answer to another of your "guess who said..." thingies:

Some Legendary Names:

Nosmo King

[Anderson, 1924]

Many ministers could, from personal experience, tell of strange names bestowed upon infants at their baptism, but few could equal the following story recently told by the Bishop of Sodor and Man.

A mother who was on the lookout for a good name for her child saw on the door of a building the word "Nosmo". It attracted her, and she decided that she would adopt it.

Some time later, passing the same building, she saw the name "King" on another door. She thought the two would sound well together, and so the boy was baptized, "Nosmo King Smith".

On her way home from the church where the baptism had taken place, she passed the building again. The two doors on which she had seen the names were now closed together, and what she read was not "Nosmo King," but "No Smoking".

Hey, NSNP, stick your Nosmo comments where they belong, on the Nosmo page.

This page is reserved for serious analysis of American foreign policy, and random irrelevant doomologies from Asmund. (PG has been awarded the Freedom of 2wheels, and is allowed to say what he wants, where he wants, for the entertainment of the masses.)

OK?

As for dogs, me ol' pilchard-canner, there was one staying in the next-door hotel room last night. He savaged me at 3 am while I was feeling my way down the darkened corridor, en route to the vomitorium.

I now have ebola-rabies-bird-flu, which feels much better than last night's food poisoning (obtained from a dodgy courgette kebab).

Dogs think firecrackers are a string of sausages, and start going for them.

You've got to get them lit, and fast. A two-hand job, usually.

Now bear in mind that this is a laden bike, so you can't do a Lance-Armstrong-down-the-Champs-Elysees-Look-Ma-No-Hands trick. Take both hands off the handlebars, and ISFB (Involuntary Separation From Bicycle) will swiftly follow.

What do you do? Light the firecrackers while they're draped round your neck, and blow your head off?

Or try hanging them from the handlebars? Dogs grab them, pulling you down...

Oh Asmund, pillar of lunacy and all that is good about cycling, Norway, and the world, how did you plan to deploy your Weapons of Mass Eruption? Were they perhaps, like Mr Hussein's, on 45-minute standby?